She didn’t back down, not even a millimeter. The moment hung between them like a poised sword.
Finally, she said, “You’re an idiot.”
Then she stalked off back toward the fire escape.
Part II
Chapter Eleven
DJANGO DIDN’T REMEMBER how long he’d aimlessly walked the streets of Kabuki-chō, yearning to see Yuka, to talk to her. But right now he knew that just seeing her would break him in two. If he had to kill her, he might as well kneel and commit seppuku right beside her body.
Bouts of wooziness washed over him, then subsided, probably because he had overtaxed his reserves. He was exhausted in body, mind, and spirit. His pools of mahō were depleted. Or maybe it was just despair over the idea that the yakuza had turned sweet, beautiful Yuka into a stone-cold killer, and that it was his job to stop her before innocent people got hurt. No one was going to mourn a bunch of dead gangsters except other gangsters—and maybe their mothers. But if the bloodshed caught civilians in the crossfire, the police were going to go full nuclear. And then they would get massacred. And then it would be up to the Council—or rather, Django and the other Hunter-Seekers—to clean it all up. Right now, he couldn’t bear to replenish his powers by opening his Brand, not after the awfulness that had washed through him when he’d done it earlier tonight. His mouth still carried some nasty aftertaste.
What a mess. The back alleys of Tokyo were going to run red.
Japan was one of the safest countries on the planet. Except for perhaps Hunter-Seekers. The murder rate per capita was among the lowest anywhere. The U.S. violent crime rate was almost a hundred times higher. The surge of coming violence was about to set this country on its ear.
A pale presence ghosted behind him, slinking between potted plants, vending machines, and parked vehicles as if keeping an eye out.
“Are you going to follow me all night?” Django said.
“That depends,” Cat said, sidling up beside him. “Are you going to do anything stupid?”
“Looks like I’m in the middle of a chain of stupid.”
“So it seems.”
“I can’t see the end of the chain.”
“The last link is your death.”
“Yup.”
“So break the chain. Do something intelligent.”
Django barked a laugh. “Yeah, right. I don’t even know where to start.”
What he’d witnessed in that office block had shaken him worse than he thought. The sheer carnage was like nothing he’d ever seen. He couldn’t think straight. Yuka was involved. Xing was pissed at him, or worse, preparing to paint a bullseye on his chest.
“I’m fucked.”
The rake of Cat’s claws across the back of his thigh jerked him back to the moment. He leaped away and half drew his sword. “Asshole!”
Cat hissed at him. “Since when did you become such a baby?”
“Fuck you.”
“Baka! Self-pity is the path to death and damnation.”
Django’s teeth clenched. He was done being jabbed. And he was so, so tired. He slid his sword back into its saya. “Leave me alone,” he said as he walked away.
Cat let him go.
Half an hour later, he stumbled up to his apartment door. In another half an hour, dawn would come and let the normal human world pretend that Django’s world, the world of yokai and obake, did not exist.
He glanced down in time to see a carpet of spiders swarming toward him from across the landing, across the apartment block’s exterior wall, over the balcony railing, across the ceiling, closing in around him. Thousands of them, a seething blanket of hairy legs and bulbous bodies and beady eyes. Little thumps hit his shoulders, landed in his hair.
A cry of disgust and alarm ripped out of him, momentarily dispelling the cloud of exhaustion. He vaulted over the handrail and dropped four stories into a hedge, crushing it to the ground. It broke his fall but still drove the breath out of him. If not for the protection of his oilskin duster, the hedge would have torn him to shreds. He extricated himself from it, rolling onto all fours, groaning.
He tried to open his Third Eye and scan for threats, but his otherworldly vision was bleary, like waking up from the worst hangover in history. All of his pools felt like dry, empty mud puddles. His mahō depleted, he would have to deal with this threat with muscle and steel.
Whipping out his sword, he scanned rooftops, balconies, anywhere his attacker might hide. He caught the scent of blood on the air. The most likely explanation for that was a warlock or a witch using blood to solidify their illusions. The direction of the breeze turned his head toward the rear of the property where a concrete wall about five feet high supported another hedgerow. Someone, or something, moved behind it.
He charged down the walk that ran between the hedge he’d fallen into and the row of first-floor apartment doors. The scuffling of movement came from behind the other hedgerow. He tried to summon his Fire for a Sunblade, but all he got was a diminishing trickle of sparks. He had no Earth left for defense and no Third Eye left for sight or stealth. No magical way to cloud the mind of any normal human witness.
He leaped through a narrow gap in the upper hedge onto a mulch-covered, earthen embankment. The embankment rose to a narrow driveway occupied by a vacant delivery truck, not the huge panel van delivery trucks like back in the U.S. but a petite Mitsubishi two-seater that wouldn’t win a tussle with a Volkswagen Beetle.
Casting left and right for his attacker, he found the area behind the hedge empty.
“Show yourself, coward!” he growled, crouching.
That’s when he heard the pop-pop-pop of a suppressed pistol and felt the pressure wave of a bullet passing a finger’s breadth from his face, then a sledge-hammer hit him in the chest, bowling him onto his back.
Stunned and gasping for breath, he scrambled onto all fours and thrust himself through the hedgerow, making his own gap, then tumbled five feet onto the concrete below. A flattened 9mm slug fell from his breast. Chalk up another save to the duster he’d permanently infused with defensive Earth mahō, turning its fibers stronger than Kevlar. He’d have a bruise the size of a pie plate, and maybe a cracked rib, but he was alive.
Where had all those spiders gone? Had they even been real? He couldn’t be sure, but he wasn’t about to wait for a swarm of them to bite him. Some of them he knew to be venomous, jorogumo and redback spiders.
A flash of thought—could that be what killed the yakuza lieutenant? Or maybe even Django’s mother?
He had no choice. He needed magic for this fight.
He opened his Brand wide. The cosmos poured into him in all its glory and horror. His essence pools sprang to life, coruscating with power inside him.
His mouth filled with the taste of blood and pain, of shattered teeth and boundless suffering, of the sensation of his lifeblood—but not his—pouring out yet powerless to stop it. Tears streamed down his face. Fear turned his limbs to water. He retched at the thick taste of blood that didn’t exist. The emotion of whatever being’s essence he had just absorbed soaked into his body.
He had time for two quick, steadying breaths before he heard movement above him then saw a flicker of shadow. He heard the scuff of two nimble feet alighting upon the balcony directly above him.
Spitting the imagined taste of blood from his mouth, gritting his teeth against the noxious emotions that didn’t belong to him, he seized this fresh influx of power. Opening his Third Eye, he sent it out to reveal his attacker.
An instant later, the figure on the balcony directly above him stood limned in an aura of sickly green and spasms of yellow. Threads of stealth-indigo trickled over his skin like sheet lightning, visible only to another Third Eye. The attacker was using mostly Air and Fire, possibly tainted with blood. Illusions of living creatures made real? What was more, he was swathed in shadows that made the normal human eye simply slide over him, pass him, and fail to notice him. The man knew Shadow Veil.
He also had a Glock semi-
automatic in one hand, its barrel extended by a suppressor. In his other hand glinted a dagger. Both arms were slathered in blood up to his elbows. He stood naked to the waist, a lean, wiry shape. His legs were covered in black tights, with ninja-style tabi on his feet. Tattoos covered both arms and left breast, wrapping around to his left shoulder blade. They were too intricate to discern their imagery in the dark, but in the light of Django’s Third Eye, patches of them throbbed with luminescence. Such tattoos would not be worn in Japan by anyone except a yakuza soldier. That his entire torso was not yet covered in irezumi told Django that this was a lower-ranked member. The strength of his aura suggested a Level One, maybe a Level Two.
With his fresh infusion of essence, Django gathered Celestial healing energy into his chest and Earth energy to build a Fortress around him.
But the assassin had the high ground. It was time to take it away from him.
He darted around the corner of the apartment building to the roof access ladder on the side. A cylindrical cage enclosed the ladder, and a padlocked grate closed the lower end to prevent roof access. Django congratulated himself on his innate paranoia because, against an event like this, he had long since rigged the padlock. He jerked it open, dropping the grate wide, and scrambled up the ladder.
Around the corner of the second-floor balcony, the muzzle of the suppressed Glock swung, the assassin’s arm and face close behind
Django was caught in the open. A hail of bullets exploded straight at him. His Root pool felt them slam into his Fortress, which deflected them.
The assassin muttered a curse and slid out of sight.
Django scrambled up two more floors and leaped onto the roof.
Only one of them would see the sunrise. The assassin could not go home and tell his bosses he had failed, or his life would be over. Moreover, killing another mahō user could mean leveling up if the combination of the dead man’s essence pools could fill voids and Awaken the victor’s. Oh, yes, the assassin would come.
With his fresh infusion of mahō, sickening as it was, Django engulfed himself in shadow, making it difficult for the human eye to focus on him. It might give him the split second he needed.
In the half light, the roof itself started to move. The swarm of spiders had found him. The seething carpet of legs swept toward him at astonishing speed. Where was the assassin?
Django’s Third Eye found him on the fourth-floor balcony, deep in concentration, his aura flaring with the effort of whatever spell he’d created.
Now would be the perfect time to try instantaneously Shadow Blinking directly behind someone. He summoned his will, intention, and essence, took a deep breath and...Shadow Blinked.
But instead of leaping from the shadow of an electrical junction box directly behind the assassin, as he’d intended, he emerged from the shadow of an apartment door six feet away. His slash toward the attacker’s neck, which would have been lethal, whiffed. Cursing, he slashed again, but the assassin was quick, dropping like a rag doll and rolling away, avoiding Django’s second slash. His parents would have both kicked his ass for failing to cultivate his skills.
He recognized the same dodging and rolling techniques his mother had taught him from an early age but didn’t let it slow his attack. He charged forward with a thrust, then a slash, then a shuriken. The assassin grunted and flinched, Django’s four-pointed star embedded in the meat of his shoulder.
But then the assassin raised his bloody left hand like a claw and extended it toward Django, who had just enough time to recognize the image of entwined mukadé, venomous giant centipedes, in the tattoos before they poured forth like a fire hose, splatting into Django’s face and chest with their hard, ropy carapaces and sharp legs. He cried out in disgust and loathing and slapped two cigar-sized creatures off his face.
But not before one of them bit him.
Agony lanced through his cheek and eye. His cheek began to swell, his eyes streaming tears.
The awfulness of the Japanese giant centipede was not to be underestimated, as it grew to almost a foot in length with a near-indestructible carapace. The foremost segment contained a pair of jaw-like appendages with venom glands. The natural centipede’s bite was extremely painful but not deadly. These, however, were magical and made real by the touch of blood. Who knew what augmentations this assassin had designed into them?
Django squeezed his eyes shut, relying on his Third Eye to gauge the distance.
The Glock came up toward his face.
He slashed an upward diagonal. A severed hand and the pistol went flying over the railing.
Wet warmth sprayed Django’s face. In his Third Eye vision, the sight of fresh, mahō-rich blood was like a cascade of glitter.
The assassin staggered back, but not fast enough to avoid Django’s downward stroke that cleaved his torso from clavicle to liver. He toppled to the ground, gasping his last.
But the mukadé were real and still crawling all over him. He whipped off his duster and shook it, sending giant centipedes scuttling and flying in all directions. He kicked some over the edge of the balcony, stomping the others, but their carapaces were so hard they felt like cables underfoot. A casual stomp wouldn’t kill one; it took a stomp of serious resolve.
Then Django opened his Crown, touched the dying man’s pate, and funneled his mahō essence into himself. Strength burst through his limbs along with a taste not unlike the smell of a cage full of cockroaches, making him shudder with distaste. Bursts of Air and Fire filled his pools, bringing his Heart and Hara pools incrementally closer to Awakening. Warm rejuvenation washed through him.
Django flicked the blood from his blade and sheathed it, then retrieved his throwing star from the assassin’s shoulder. He looked up and down the row of apartment doors. In a window two doors down, the slats of a set of Venetian blinds snapped closed.
There was a witness. Fortunately, his Shadow Veil would keep any human witness from being able to describe his appearance, but no doubt the police were already on their way. He didn’t know any of his neighbors, and he always kept his weapons magically concealed when he was in public.
With no more time to waste, he sprinted toward his apartment. He had to get out of here, and right now. The assassin might not be alone. The police could be here any second. Silent as the breath of a fox, he slid through his front door and closed it behind him.
This apartment was over. The Black Lotus Clan knew where he lived. He would take what he needed from this apartment and sleep in cheap hotels until this was over—if he survived, that is. But for now, he was back to living on the street.
Fortunately, living like a vagrant was practically a habit. All this furniture and cookware were third-hand castoffs. The only things that mattered to him were the photos of his family and the hand-written notebooks on ninjutsu and Monkey kung-fu, some of them ancient, that his parents had left him. Of his brother, he had nothing but memories. What he had, he stuffed into a leather satchel that he threw over his shoulder.
Then he thumbed in Sergeant Tokumaru’s number, or rather, he made several tries as one of his eyes was swelling shut from the mukadé bite. His cheek felt like it had a golf ball under the skin.
As the phone rang, he wondered if Tokumaru would be on duty at this time of night. Probably, as he’d been on the graveyard shift for a while. Django’s expectation proved true when the call connected.
“Talk to me, Django-san.”
“You’re not going to like it,” Django said. “There’s a dead Black Lotus Clan assassin on the balcony outside my apartment.” He gave Tokumaru his address.
“Your handiwork?”
Django didn’t answer the question but set about clearing his apartment of any magical evidence, leaving nothing for the mundane world to discover. All the protective wards, the white slips of ofuda covering the walls, windows, and front door, he tore down, crumpled up, and stuffed into the satchel.
The line hung silent until Tokumaru spoke in a tone trying too hard to be jocular. “You liv
e in Takatanobaba? I thought you were rich.”
“You’re a funny guy. Look, we need to talk. Some bad shit is coming down. The police need to know.”
“You mean after we arrest you for murder?”
“Are you serious?”
“If there are any witnesses, I won’t be able to protect you, Black Lotus assassin or not.”
“So self-defense means nothing?”
“You’re carrying a real sword. That alone is cause for arrest. Plus, you’re a gaijin. They can decide to hold you for twenty-three days before filing charges. You’d be a sitting duck in jail.”
“There are too many innocent lives at stake for me to allow that.”
“Did you hear about Kabuki-chō?”
“I did.”
Tokumaru’s voice went grim. “The most awful thing I’ve ever seen. The whole police force is in shock. I hope you can tell me you weren’t involved.”
“I wasn’t involved.”
“But I get the sense you might know who was.”
“Black Lotus Clan.”
The line hung silent as Tokumaru absorbed the implications. Then he said, “If you get sideways of this, I won’t be able to cover for you.”
“Wakatta.” Understood. “You got kids, Tokumaru-san?”
“Two.”
“Hug them.” Then he hung up.
Chapter Twelve
DJANGO KNEW OF A LOVE hotel nearby that had no human clerk, called Hotel J-Spa. In the luridly lit foyer was a two-meter touchscreen featuring photos of the hotel’s themed rooms. He picked the tropical island theme, touched the screen, slid enough cash into a blinking slot for three full days, and followed the flashing yellow arrows on the floor to his door. This kind of discretion would let him lie low long enough for meditation and rejuvenation.
His room was a kitschy extravaganza of faux-palm fronds, netting, and nautical decor lit in shifting rainbow colors. He stripped and reviewed the damage in the mirror. Several bruises like asteroid craters pocked his back and ribs. One eye was swollen shut. His face still felt like it was on fire as a scarlet, connect-the-dots track stitched across it from where the mukadé’s sharp legs had punctured his skin. He used the last of his Celestial mahō to bring the swelling down so that he could see. Fortunately, the centipede’s venom didn’t appear to be any more potent than normal.
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